The Punishment of Virtue (49 page)

3.
E.g., April Witt, “Afghan Governor Strains to Shed Warlord Image, Gul Agha's Rule in Kandahar Dismays Some in Kabul,”
Washington Post,
April 15, 2003, p. A-22.

CHAPTER 17: MILITARY MATTERS

1.
This problem eventually came to the attention of the Kandahar base command. In late 2004, I introduced six men as laborers on base—the first and only ones to work there who did not owe alliegance to Shirzai. They were explicitly chosen by base command to serve as a lance-head to begin to break the Shirzais' monopoly. By 2005, the monopoly was significantly weakened, with the Shirzais winning only some 40 percent of contracts on base, down from 80 to 90 percent. The details in this paragraph were communicated to me in private by U.S. Army officers responsible for the relevant contracts. Cf. James Glanz “Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects,”
New York Times,
January 25, 2006, p. A1.

CHAPTER 18: SECURITY

1.
Interestingly, the female delegates seem to have been less intimidated than the men. One stepped to the podium and made ringing mention of the warlords' pasts, waving a hand at a nearby neighborhood destroyed by one of the delegates' shelling. One female focus group participant said: “Who cares if they turned the microphones off when we criticized them. We could just shout.” See Sarah Chayes “Topak Salaran Basta,” Loya Jirge Focus Groups Study, January 2003, available on www.afghansforcivilsociety.org.

CHAPTER 19: THE COMING OF ISLAM

1.
Clifford Edmund Bosworth,
Sistan Under the Arabs, from the Islamic Conquest to the Rise of the Saffarids
(Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1968).

2. A
sadi de Tus,
Le Livre de Gerchasp, Volume 1
, Clement Huart, ed., and trans. (Paris: Geuthner, 1926), p. 39. My translation from the French. Of course, no translation out of Persian can begin to do justice to the sound of its poetry, blessed as Persian is with vowels that are both rich and clear, inviting frequent assonance as well as rhyme.

3. A
bul Qasim Firdowsi,
The Epic of the Kings
, Reuben Levy, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967), p. 15, and for this version of Jamshid's reign, pp. 9–11.

4.
For a discussion of the achievements of Islamic Persia, see Richard Frye,
The Golden Age of Persia
(London: Phoenix, 2000) (1st ed., 1975).

5.
Approximately.

6.
Firdowsi, p. 50.

7.
Ibid., pp. 50–52.

8.
Jos J. L. Gommans,
The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c.1710–1780
(Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 1999); cf. Rudyard Kipling,
Kim
: the character of Mahbub Ali, a Pashtun horse trader, spy, and friend of Kim's, or Kipling's short story “Drey Wara Yow Dee,” narrated by another Pashtun horse dealer from Afghanistan.

9.
Cf. Mary Renault,
The Nature of Alexander
(New York: Pantheon, 1976), pp. 33–34.

10.
Some etymologies of the name Kandahar trace it back to the Persianized version of Alexander. But though there is good reason to believe that Alexandria in Arachosia, one of the cities the Macedonian conqueror left in his wake, was indeed located beside modern Kandahar, archaeologists do not agree upon the exact site of the city. The true origins of the name Kandahar are subject to a similar dispute. See C. E. Bosworth's article on Kandahar in the
Encyclopedia of Islam.

11.
Firdowsi, p. 109.12. Strabo,
Geography, XV 2:9:
“Alexander took these [lands inhabited by the Aracoti and other tribes, near the Indus] away from the Arians, and established settlements of his own, but Seleucus Nikator gave them to Sandrocottus [Chandragupta] upon terms of intermarriage and of receiving in exchange five hundred elephants.” Horace Leonard Jones, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classics, Harvard University Press, 1930), p.143.

13.
Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli and Giovanni Garbini, “A Bilingual Graeco-Aramaic Edict by Asoka,” in
Serie Orientale Roma 29 (1964)
(Rome: IsMEO, 1964).

14.
Ibid., p. 60.

15.
Ibid., p. 109.

16.
For this whole episode, ibid., pp. 195–211.

17.
Hugh Kennedy,
The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 2nd ed.
(London: Pearson, 2004), p. 59. See also Marshall G. S. Hodgeson,
The Venture of Islam, Volume 1, the Classical Age of Islam
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1977) (1st ed., 1974), pp. 197–200.

18.
Hodgeson, pp. 208–11.

19.
Asadi de Tus, p. 74.

20.
Ibid., p. 98.

21.
Bosworth,
Sistan,
p. 20. Cf. Frye, pp. 51–52, 92–93.

22.
Al-Baladhuri,
Futuh al-Buldan
Part II, Francis Murgotten, trans. (New York: Columbia, 1924), p.144.

23.
Bosworth, pp. 34–35.

24.
This version of events is quoted from
The History of al-Tabari, Volume XXII, the Marwanid Restoration
, Everett Rowson, trans. (New York: SUNY, 1989), pp. 182–88. In the interest of style, I occasionally change a verb tense or substitute a synonym for a word in the text. Cf. Baladhuri, pp. 150–51.

25.
“Their city,” in the next sentence, would probably have been the summer capital, Ghazni, rather than the Kandahar region, since the raid must have been launched during the traditional fighting season, and since only that location would allow for Muslim passage across the vast tracts of land described.

26.
Al-Tabari, p. 185; Bosworth, p. 54.

27.
Kufa and Basra.

28.
This part of the story, from al-Hajjaj's letter to ibn al-Ash'ath's, can be found in at-Tabari, Vol. 22, pp. 188–94. See also Bosworth, pp. 57–59, and Julius Wellhausen,
The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall,
Margaret Weir, trans. (Beirut: Khayats, 1963) (1st ed.,1927), pp. 231–32.

29.
Al-Tabari, Vol. 23, p. 4.

30.
Ibid., pp. 50–51.

31.
For this part of the story, see al-Tabari, Vol. 23, pp. 1–9, 49–53, 77–80; Baladhuri, pp. 151–52 (though his interpretation is rather different); Bosworth, pp. 58–63; and Wellhausen, pp. 232–41.

32.
Bosworth, p. 101.

33.
Ibid., p. 104. Gardez is the Afghan region where most of the firefights take place between U.S. outposts and “resurgent Taliban.”

34.
Ibid., 105–21; R. N. Frye, ed.,
The Cambridge History of Iran,
Vol. 4, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 106–14; Theodore Noldeke,
Sketches from Eastern History,
John Sutherland Black, trans. (Beirut: Khayats, 1963), pp. 176–79.

35.
Cambridge History of Iran,
Vol. 4, pp. 111–12.36.
Saffar
means “coppersmith.” 37.
Cambridge History of Iran,
Vol. 4, pp. 129–30, 607–8.

CHAPTER 21: MURDER

1.
Steve Coll,
Ghost Wars
(New York: Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 118–19, 121, ff.

2.
See, e.g., Owen Benett Jones,
Pakistan: The Eye of the Storm
(New York: Yale,2002), pp. 100–4.

3.
Coll; George Crile,
Charlie Wilson's War
(New York: Grove Atlantic, 2003); Ahmad Rashid,
Taliban
(New Haven: Yale, 2001), p. 184.

4.
Rashid, p. 186.5. See Rashid's chapter 14: “Master or Victim, Pakistan's Afghan War,” for telling details about Pakistan's involvement in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the limits to Pakistan's overlordship, and the devastating impact on Pakistan's hopes for a healthy development.

CHAPTER 22: MONGOL CONQUESTS AND REBIRTH

1.
The Secret History of the Mongols,
p. 264, a few words cut and brackets removed for clarity. Urgunge Onon, trans. (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001), p. 255, or the definitive scholarly edition, Igor de Rachewiltz (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 195.

2.
Mary Renault,
The Nature of Alexander
(London: Pantheon, 1976), pp. 103–5.

3.
Guy MacLean Rogers,
Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness
(New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 110–11. This book is particularly useful for its clear maps.

4.
Renault, p. 134.

5.
Ibid., p. 167.

6.
For the details of Alexander's campaigns, drawn from a rather limited number of ancient sources, there is an abundance of secondary literature. Apart from Rogers and Renault, cited above, see Mary Renault's fictional version,
The Persian Boy,
narrated by the young Persian eunuch who in fact became Alexander's intimate. It is a dazzling piece of historical reconstruction.

7.
Ata-Malik Juvaini,
Genghis Khan, the History of the World-Conqueror,
J. A. Boyle, trans. (Paris: UNESCO, 1997), p. 116. Current standard transliteration puts a “y” in place of the first “i” in the author's last name.

8.
See the very detailed description by papal envoy Giovanni di Plano Carpini in 1247.
The Story of the Mongols Whom We Call the Tartars,
Erik Hildinger, trans. (Boston: Brandon Publishing, 1996), p. 72.

9.
Almost as much secondary literature exists about the Mongols as about Alexander. For their general description, I have relied principally on Jack Weatherford,
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
(New York: Crown, 2004). On their battle tactics, see the excellent firsthand account by di Plano Carpini, above.

10.
Juvaini, p. 98.

11.
Ibid., p. 104.

12.
Weatherford, pp. 5–6.

13.
Minhaj ad-Din Juzjani,
Tabakat-i Nasiri,
H. G. Raverty, trans. (New Delhi: Oriental Reprint, 1970), p. 966.

14.
In the case of Bukhara, its townsmen served these purposes against their own inner fortress, whose “moat had been filled with animate and inanimate, and raised up with levies and Bukharans…. Then the people of Bukhara were driven against thecitadel. And on either side the furnace of battle was heated.” Juvaini, p. 106.

15.
Ibid., p. 118.